Photo Courtesy: Fruitwood Farms, Inc.

The Drexel Farmers Market, which was taken over by Philadelphia-based agriculture program Farm to City in May 2014, will be moving its operations to Chestnut Square between Zavino and Shake Shack starting fall quarter 2014.

The previous vendor of five years, farmer John King, notified Drexel he would be retiring at the start of this season. King helped launch the current partnership between the Farmers Market and Farm to City, which has been operating in front of the Dragon statue and out of the Recreation Center lobby.

“The new Chestnut Square courtyard was quickly identified as a location for the Farmers Market because of its open and welcoming location,” Joseph Russo, director of the Dragon Card Office, said.

The Farmers Market now receives produce from two local farms as a result of the partnership with Farm to City. Lead by Matthew Weiss, Farm to City is a mission-driven small business in Philadelphia that organizes farmers markets as well as other local food programs. Weiss has partnered Drexel’s Farmers Market with Fruitwood Farms, and Urban Tree Connection & Neighborhood Foods Farm.

Fruitwood Farms is run by farm manager Mike Nelson and located in Monroeville, New Jersey. Fruitwood farms produces about 45 different fruits and vegetables on their farm as well as honey. Urban Tree Connection & Neighborhood Foods Farm, located in the Haddington neighborhood of West Philadelphia, is led by Executive Director Skip Wiener.

“Local, seasonal produce tends to be more flavorful and vibrant than grocery store-bought produce because it is picked fresh and does not have to travel long distances or spend extensive amounts of time in refrigeration before being brought to market,” Dorothy Ann Buttz, the farm marketing manager at the UTC&NF Farm, said.

“Eating locally also affords the Drexel student an opportunity to expand their culinary palate and try new produce varieties that are not available commercially.”

UTC&NF Farm will be providing baby greens, spinach, kale, mustard greens, arugula, lettuce, bunched greens, collards, broccoli raab, root vegetables, rainbow carrots, colorful beets, vibrant turnips, radish, butternut squash, squash, garlic, herbs and more.

“While there are numerous personal benefits to be enjoyed by consuming locally grown and produced foods, buying local produce is not only about personal benefit,” Buttz said. “Sourcing food locally, almost always, supports more economically and environmentally sustainable approaches to farming, it helps to keep smaller family-owned business in operation, and it creates more local job opportunities for those interested in pursuing careers in agriculture and/or the food movement.”

Urban Tree Connection and Neighborhood Foods also cultivate produce in five other lots scattered throughout the city. The organizations welcome individual volunteers on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at the main farm site from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Freshman students can volunteer with the farm through their civic engagement class.

Drexel’s Farmers Market will run every Tuesday this fall from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. The Drexel Farmers Market accepts cash, DragonDollars and credit cards.

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There has been a lot of talk in the media about the strength of the human spirit surrounding the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. “Boston celebrates the human spirit,” an ESPN article headline read, and “Human spirit’s still alive in Boston,” read another from CNN. Until this weekend, I’m not sure if I even knew what the human spirit is. It wasn’t until I started running my first Tough Mudder April 19 and ended the day in the hospital that I learned exactly what the human spirit is.

For months, I planned on running and finishing the Tough Mudder in the Poconos with fellow Triangle staff members Ajon Brodie and Sandra Petri. We recruited a team and collectively waited in nervous anticipation for the event. When the day came to run, we showed up to the Poconos Raceway clad in mesh and Under Armour of varying colors, equipped with confidence and determination.

As soon as we parked and I opened the car door, I felt the wind. Nothing could prepare any of the Mudders competing that weekend for the wind. We walked through registration with the rest of the Tough Mudders and waited at the starting line for our wave time to be called. Before heading to the official start, a Tough Mudder volunteer ran through some important information. “If you see someone face down in the mud, do not touch them,” he said. “Hold your arms over your head crossed like an X,” he demonstrated, and the crowd followed his example. At the time, I was thinking, “Does that actually happen to people? Do people actually get that hurt?”

Yes, yes they do.

After so much anticipation, the race began. Somehow, we made it to the mile 10 marker of the 11.6-mile course with little incident. My team basically carried me the entire time. Up until that point, the race went a lot like this: Oh look, it’s a wall. Someone needs to push me over that wall. Oh look, it’s a quarter pipe. Someone needs to pull me up that quarter pipe. The obstacles that involved jumping into freezing cold water were pretty easy for me, except the fact that it was windy as all hell when we got out.

By this point, people had actually started lying on the asphalt of the Raceway to get some warmth from the sun. For miles, we had been in and out of water obstacles, and with the wind refusing to let up, it was hard to get warm. Mudders were jokingly diagnosing themselves with hypothermia, and the warmth provided by the surface of the racetrack was enticing.

After a short break to try to warm up, the next obstacle was a ditch that we had to jump over. Sounds simple: it was probably one of the lowest-budget obstacles in the course. It was just a five-foot-wide hole in the ground with the dirt from the hole forming a mound that you had to climb over once you had completed the leap. I took one look at that obstacle and resolved to skip it. I knew I couldn’t make it across and would have to rely on my team to lift me up by my dead arms out of the pit of cold mud.

Two of our teammates, both over six feet tall, had just barely made it over the ditch. “I don’t think Sandra should try this,” one of them said. We looked back at her and saw a look of determination cross her face as she started running toward the obstacle. “I can’t watch,” another teammate said.

Sandra ended up making it across, but not without hitting the ground and making one of the sickest sounds of the day. I had only heard that sound once before — when my little sister fell to the ground from the top of our childhood tree house. I didn’t know what, but I knew Sandra had broken something.

Like a stone in a pond, Sandra had set off a rippled reaction of human compassion. A registered nurse competing in the race sprinted toward her to help, while about 50 people around us threw up X’s over their heads to get medical attention. I didn’t even know my body was capable of any more movement, but I found myself sprinting toward the nearest red truck I could see. When I came back to the obstacle, Sandra was shivering face down in the mud swaddled in blankets and waiting for her leg to be splinted. Holding back vomit and tears, I sat next to her while we waited. “How am I going to get to work on Monday?” she asked Ajon and me weakly.

As she got lifted onto the stretcher our team decided that the race was over for us and we would accompany Sandra to the medical tent. “You guys have to finish. You’re so close,” she said. So I thanked the nurse that had stayed with her the whole time and the man who had loaned us towels to keep warm, and we finished the Tough Mudder for Sandra.

At the finish line, I picked up my cup of Dos Equis and chugged it on the way to the medical tent. I hadn’t eaten since 7:30 a.m., plus we ran the 11.6-mile course, and by this point it was roughly 5 p.m., so I instantly became drunk. We found Sandra lying in the tent with several emergency professionals around her prepping her to be put in the ambulance. All of these people were focused on getting her comfortable and on to better help. I focused on making dumb drunk jokes to get Sandra to stop thinking about the pain.

Eventually she was lifted into the ambulance, and we rode to the hospital. After X-rays, she finally got the confirmation of bad news we had been waiting for. One leg was fractured in two places and she broke the ankle on her other. She wouldn’t be able to walk for some time, and for a person as active as Sandra, this news was debilitating.

Her parents, brother, sister and boyfriend drove up from southern New Jersey to the Poconos and arrived just as they were prepping Sandra for surgery. “Thank you for taking care of my baby girl,” Sandra’s mom said. “I got your back, girl,” I replied, still slightly inebriated. Her brother handed me the keys to their house so I could sleep there that night.

Finally at 9:30 p.m., Sandra was ready to get wheeled out to surgery. Completely drugged up, still muddy and wearing her Tough Mudder finisher headband she said, “Look how many people are here! I’m so famous!”

In that moment I learned what the human spirit is. The human spirit is the people who pushed me over all those damn walls on the course. The human spirit is the nurse on the course who stopped running a race — which cost her at least $100 — to comfort a complete stranger. The human spirit is the team of medical professionals focused on getting Sandra to the hospital quickly and efficiently. The human spirit is Sandra’s whole family driving two hours to be with her. The human spirit is Sandra maintaining a positive attitude during a very painful, hard time.

What happened in Boston last year was terrifying, but what happened after those bombs went off and what happened the same day one year later is what we should take from the Boston Marathon bombing. What we should remember — and what we should celebrate — is that for every person with evil intentions in the world, there are hundreds of good people willing to make sacrifices to help others.

At the starting line of every Tough Mudder around the country, a man named Sean Corvelle gives a pep talk to the racers. On April 19, he called everyone at the starting line heroes. Tough Mudder showed me the human spirit and that everyone is capable of being a hero. I am writing because I don’t think we need a tragedy to become heroes. The announcer said that a hero is someone who puts their shopping carts back in the designated shopping cart areas so other people don’t hit them with their cars. Someone who gets up every day and gets it done. On April 19, I saw that a hero is someone who goes out of their way to help someone else, despite who they are or what they stand for, and that is the best representation of the human spirit.

Helen Nowotnik is editor emeritus at the Triangle, She can be contacted at helen.nowotnik@thetriangle.org.

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Twenty years ago, in January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect. The agreement was proposed by then-Mexican President Carlos Salinas to help the Mexican economy. The theory was that free trade with the United States would stimulate the Mexican economy, and, as a result, many experts thought the amount of illegal immigrants passing into the United States would decrease. They were wrong. NAFTA did not quite end up working the way Salinas dreamed it would.

From the 1930s up until the 1980s, Mexican officials had tried to keep the country out of foreign trade. The country had placed restrictions on foreign investment and controlled the exchange rate to encourage domestic industrial growth. Unfortunately, in the 1980s Mexico saw a steep rise in inflation and a debt crisis in 1982 that would make the Mexican government unable to meet the country’s foreign debt obligations.

Mexican officials soon began to reverse the country’s stance on foreign trade to help the economy. But the country was already in a state of degradation. The standard of living of the Mexican people declined throughout the ‘80s and continued to decline throughout the ‘90s and 2000s. Corruption ran rampant through local Mexican governments and slowly worked its way up to the higher positions. Money was scarce, and the people in power wanted it.

By 2008, Mexico’s exports made up 31 percent of the country’s GDP — a 10 percent increase from 1988. Over 80 percent of Mexico’s exports went directly to the United States. While this rise in exports as a percentage GDP seems good on paper, the Mexican people are still struggling now more than ever, and that’s due to several factors effected by NAFTA.

When NAFTA first came into effect, it cost less for Mexicans to import corn from the United States than it cost for them to produce their own. The United States increased corn exports by 400 percent when NAFTA originally started. United States farmers could afford this export increase because their corn production was subsidized heavily. For 10 years, Mexicans enjoyed cheap imports of corn, wheat, meat and other staples from the United States. Mexican farmers could not compete with the prices of imports coming from the United States, and many closed their farms. By the early 2000s, corn import dependency of Mexicans had grown from 8 percent to 32 percent.

In 2007, corn in the United States began to be produced for other less-than-tasty reasons. Forty percent of United States corn production went into producing ethanol. The price of the rest of the corn crops increased twofold. Some other export prices doubled or even tripled. Along with the rising prices of imports, Mexico was also affected by the global economic instability happening around that time. The country couldn’t afford imports anymore and had no working farms set up.

Also happening alongside the great Mexican food dependency withdrawal was the great Mexican factory development. Many border towns saw an increase in U.S.-owned factories. Named the “maquiladora,” the manufacturing operations in the free trade zones of Mexico helped put many Mexicans back to work. Because of NAFTA, the factories are able to import material and equipment duty-free and tariff-free. They then export the products back to the United States.

In an age when we as Americans all feel bad for factory workers in China and other countries that are the subject of the most press, our neighbors are working in similar conditions with less attention drawn to them. These maquiladoras have to compete against the factories in China and Indonesia, so compensation is abysmal. Mexican women work for one-sixth of the United States’ hourly rate. The Mexican minimum wage set by the government is hardly enough to sustain a family.

On top of the lack of proper compensation, the environmental implications of the factories are frightening. In 1983, Mexico and the United States signed the La Paz Agreement, which requires hazardous waste created by United States corporations to be transported back to the United States for disposal. Unsurprisingly, this agreement is rarely enforced. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, only 91 of the approximately 600 maquiladoras located along the Texas-Mexico border returned any waste since 1987. So where does it all go?

Some maquiladoras illegally dispose the factories’ waste into Mexico’s rivers or deserts. Water in the towns where the maquiladoras are located is undrinkable. Some water is so bad that Mexicans can’t use it for bathing or other necessary life uses. Some water causes lasting genetic mutations and not only affects the adults working, but also affects their children.

So why should Americans care about all of the effects NAFTA has had on Mexico? Now, in 2014, 55 million Mexicans are estimated to live in poverty. That’s about half of the Mexican population. With little opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty in Mexico, Mexicans are continuing to migrate illegally into the United States. Roughly one-quarter of the Mexican population lives in the Mexican countryside, but 44 percent of illegal immigrants are these countryside dwellers. With the agricultural economy crushed, Mexicans not living near maquiladora-filled border towns hardly have any way to make a living.

As with most problems, there’s always a root cause. As a country, we can’t continue to use deportation and brutal border control as tools to stop Mexican immigration. Until we reach out to the Mexican government with a holistic approach to fixing their economic and social issues, we will continue to see Mexicans traveling to the United States searching for a better life.

The damage inflicted on the Mexican people by NAFTA can’t be reversed. But I think it’s our responsibility to help the Mexican people out of it. We signed the agreement 20 years ago, which ultimately led to a serious dip in the standard of living in their country. We can’t sit idly by, criminalizing the Mexicans who flee to our country for a better life, when we were part of the reason why their lives were ruined. No, I’m not talking about moving more of our factories to Mexico and ultimately ruining the ecology of their rivers and streams.

If we set up a program where Mexicans could come to work in the United States on a temporary citizenship where they have to pay taxes but also have the right to minimum wages, I think that both nations would benefit. More Mexicans will have money to send home and stimulate the Mexican economy, and more Americans won’t have to spend tax money on deportation and border control.

The United States will always be attached to Mexico. It’s time we stopped ignoring the problems and reached out a helping hand to our neighbors.

Helen Nowotnik is a communications major at Drexel University. She can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org.

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Sandra Petri, a pre-junior studying international business, was selected to be the editor-in-chief of The Triangle for the fall 2013 and winter 2014 terms.

Petri stated that she has three main goals as editor-in-chief: to increase visibility of the student paper, to create a mobile application for The Triangle, and to build interactions with readers.

“Students can get all of the right answers when they want to know what’s going on,” she said. “We have the facts and we also have the student perspective, and those two things make us valuable to the community.”

Petri joined The Triangle on the first day of her freshman year as a news writer.

“I came to the first staff meeting on the first day of school, and I was absolutely convinced,” she said. “I was impressed by everybody and the fact that a group of students manage to publish a paper every week. I knew it would be a good way for me to build my resume and get leadership experience and just be in tune all the time with what was going on at Drexel, and that’s really what I wanted.”

Petri worked as a news writer for six months and was promoted to the assistant news editor position by the spring of her freshman year. By the fall of her sophomore year, she had been selected as the news editor at The Triangle. Citing her drive and ability to lead, Petri was also selected to join The Triangle’s Editorial Board in winter 2013.

Anne Most, a senior communication major and former editor-in-chief of The Triangle, wrote in an email, “From the day I met Sandra, I knew she would do great things for The Triangle. There was not a doubt in my mind. She is as smart as a whip, always positive and a joy to be around. I am confident that Sandra is the perfect fit to lead The Triangle, and I wish her good luck.”

In addition to the print version and the Web version of The Triangle, Petri is also working to recruit application designers to create a mobile app to view The Triangle. “I just think if you are going to go to the next level technologically, you need to have an app,” she said.

In addition to working at The Triangle, Petri is also part of the Drexel Newman ministry, the Catholic student organization on campus. Last spring, Petri joined a group led by Drexel Newman to help repair houses in Kentucky on an alternative spring break trip. She also volunteers for an organization called Back on My Feet, a group that uses running to motivate residents of homeless shelters to work out of poverty and prove to them that they are in control of their lives.

Petri is an international area studies minor and is planning to study abroad in fall 2014. She is from Mount Royal, N.J., and spends her free time in the spring coaching a little league softball team in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood.

Petri also has family ties to other journalists. Her grandfather worked at her hometown’s newspaper for years, and her uncle, who studied at Drexel in the 1970s, wrote for The Triangle as an undergrad. “I kind of have this journalistic legacy that I’m following,” she said.

When Petri started college, she knew that she wanted to be engaged in the Drexel community as much as possible.

“I’m so happy that I’m [at Drexel]. I genuinely believe that this is a good school. I genuinely believe that the professors and the administration are trying to do what’s best for the students, and nobody on the administration likes to be stagnant. They’re all like, ‘How can we be better? How can we be bigger?’ and I love that, and I love that I get to see it firsthand and talk to people about it.”

Petri said she hopes that by reading the paper, people will become more in tune and engaged with the Drexel community, learning about new organizations and activities to join..

“Stuff that we get to report on, that’s integral to our lives as Drexel students now, will be foreign to Drexel students later. But we get to record it, and people will know that they’re getting the real story from us and it’s not fluffed up. We include the good stuff and the bad stuff, and I think that’s really important,” she concluded.

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A multimedia exhibition telling the story of the Iraq War through the perspectives of a Marine, a reporter and a photojournalist, “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,” opened May 15 with a panel discussion in the URBN Center Annex.

The exhibition, currently on display in the URBN Center lobby, includes diary pages from Marine Lt. Timothy McLaughlin, texts by journalist and author Peter Maass, and photographs by Gary Knight of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was brought to Philadelphia by Drexel’s Kal and Lucille Rudman Institute for Entertainment Industry Studies and the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design.

The discussion, led by Rudman Institute Executive Director Karen Curry, included the details of how the exhibition came to fruition and why the exhibit is important, as well as the panelists’ personal opinions on the Iraq War, post-traumatic stress disorder and the media today.

In 2003, Maass and Knight were reporting on the Iraq invasion with the same battalion in which McLaughlin was serving as a tank commander. Although they didn’t meet during the war, their paths would eventually intersect in 2008 when Maass was assigned to write a story about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. When the statue was toppled in 2003, one marine put an American flag on the head of the statue.

“When I started researching this story, trying to reconstruct what happened, how that flag got there, how the statue was toppled, who gave the orders and how this kind of image was created in the media, I needed to find the flag guy. That was one of the threads that I needed to follow,” Maass said.

After some investigation, Maass learned that McLaughlin was the marine who placed the flag on the statue. Maass and McLaughlin met and got to know each other, and in 2009 McLaughlin took Maass to his parents’ home in Cambridge, N.H., where the flag was kept in a safe deposit box. While at McLaughlin’s parents’ home, McLaughlin showed Maass some of his military equipment and things he kept from the Iraq War. In his trunk of souvenirs laid two diaries he kept during the invasion of Iraq.

“You start working on something and cover something, and then something that you don’t even expect to happen, happens,” Maass said.

Maass showed the diaries to Knight, who saw the pages not only as a great story but as works of art. From here, the idea of combining each of their “versions” of the war into one exhibit was realized.

“There were so many different versions of the same event. There’s a bunch of us traveling in these cars up to Baghdad, and we witnessed everything differently and we bring our accumulated experience. I’m a photographer, Peter’s a writer, Tim’s a Marine; and I realized in the diaries that this was another version of history that we all shared,” Knight said.

McLaughlin was 25 when he wrote the diaries. The pages include light things like a picture of a young woman that McLaughlin was dating at the time and a letter he wrote to a Victoria’s Secret model. The pages also included the more serious aspects of McLaughlin’s war, like a letter to the parents of one of his Marines who was shot in the leg during an accidental fire, when he accidentally shot a civilian cab driver, as well as a list of events that changed McLaughlin’s life.

“It’s a little weird for me, to be honest. I didn’t write the diaries for you to read them,” McLaughlin said about having his diary pages on display. “When I explain to you what it is, it’s a third person explaining it to you. It’s not 2003 Tim anymore. It’s a different experience for me that I didn’t expect.”

McLaughlin left the Marine Corps in 2006 and said he had a lot of trouble transitioning. “I moved to Bosnia so I could go someplace more normal for me, which should sound weird to you.”

After coming home from Bosnia in 2009, McLaughlin said he had nightmares constantly and couldn’t sleep. Finally, in 2010, his wife told him to go get help. “Think about a 6-foot-3-inch, 230-pound war-veteran marine going up to the mental health floor. That was not an easy thing for me to do,” he said.

“If you go see a doctor in the military, we call it going to see the wizard. You probably guessed that that’s not a good connotation. You’ll get made fun of, you probably won’t get promoted, and you certainly won’t be in command of anything,” he said.

“My goal is to stand here and tell you, … on the credential list, I wear everything that I need to wear. And I tell you that I have PTSD, or whatever you want to call it, because it’s normal, and it shouldn’t be a stigma. And people should understand that when you ask [a Marine] to go do these things at 18 years old, he’s going to be affected,” McLaughlin said.

“It’s not post-traumatic stress ‘disorder’ … it would be a ‘disorder’ if I was not affected. I would be Charles Manson if I had had my experiences and wasn’t bothered by them,” he said.

McLaughlin was candid in explaining his opinion of the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying that the bureaucracy of getting seen by a doctor is too much. “The people of this country need to do a better job of making sure that the VA is there to catch people who aren’t as fortunate as me,” he said. “I’m a bright guy, and I’m capable and I can take care of myself. There are lots of people with my experiences who didn’t get as lucky as I did. … I don’t know what you think about the VA, but it doesn’t really work that well. They mean well, [but it] doesn’t work.”

McLaughlin, Maass and Knight all had a hand in picking which diary pages, photographs and texts would complete the exhibit. “It was hard because there are three of us and not one of us,” Maass joked. They wanted the exhibit to reflect their versions of reality, so they didn’t include outside producers, directors or curators.

Maass said the exhibit is a new way to tell a story. He said he hopes that people come away from the exhibit thinking about how old stories can be told in different ways because the old ways aren’t as effective. “Be experimental; find new ways of telling the same old stories because it hasn’t sunken in yet,” Maass said.

“There’s a lot of imagery; there’s a lot of video. A lot of great stories have been written about some of the war in Iraq, but what [the exhibit] does, I hope, is personalize that in some way and give you a different lens through which you can look at this war,” Knight said. “We’re just three ordinary guys who found ourselves in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time.”

The exhibit premiered previously at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York from March 14 to April 19. It will be on display in Drexel University’s URBN Center lobby May 15-23. The exhibit is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and a photo ID will be required to enter the building after 3 p.m. The full contents of McLaughlin’s diaries can be viewed at wardiaries.org.

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The Huffington Post President and Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington spoke about the positives and negatives of the ever-changing participation-driven Internet April 30 as part of the College of Arts and Sciences’ third annual Distinguished Lecture Series.

The lecture, titled “The Brave New World of the ‘New Media’: How Social Media Has Revolutionized the Communications Landscape,” was held in the Main Auditorium. There was a question-and-answer session following the lecture.

“The Distinguished Lecture Series to us is a visible sign of this integration of the arts, sciences and changing society, and I believe we cannot have a better example of this than in our speaker today, Arianna Huffington,” College of Arts and Sciences Dean Donna Murasko said in her opening remarks. “Journalism communications is the essence of where we are in the liberal arts, this humanities-social side of the campus. But she understands better than almost anyone that if we don’t employ today’s technology, this essence of communication is not going to be maximized.”

Amy Weaver, director of marketing and communications for CoAS, and assistant professor of English Jennifer Yusin organized the event.

“This series was created in the spirit of intellectual curiosity and engagement with the interdisciplinary connections among the humanities and sciences and social sciences,” Yusin said during her introduction of Huffington. “Tonight and with every lecture, we hope to engage our community in the kind of intellectual endeavors that reveal how knowledge in today’s world is bounded not by the disciplines but by an ever-expanding frontier of human curiosity.”

Huffington took the stage, donning a dragon pin, to a round of applause from the capacity audience. She began the lecture by introducing herself and added in a few jokes.

“For those of you who have not heard me before, this accent is real,” Huffington said. “I say that because I joked recently during a speech that I was born in Fresno, Calif., and I cultivated this accent to give myself an air of being an ethnic minority, which is very popular everywhere except in Arizona.”

Huffington spoke about the shift in present-day media from presentation to participation. “It’s a much more engaged and interactive process,” she said. This principal- or participation-driven media is at the heart of the creation of The Huffington Post, she said. The Post serves as both a journalistic enterprise as well as a platform to share information.

The Huffington Post will be 8 years old May 9, and it has grown from five employees to 850 employees. It is now offered in seven countries and will be adding Germany as the eighth in the fall.

“We promise our readers the best of the Web, whether we produce it or find it and bring it to them and link back to the creators of the work,” she said.

Huffington explained that there is no hierarchy of contributors to the Post, and the thing that excites her most is bringing new voices on board. She sees the future of media as being a hybrid of traditional media moving more and more online while online media do more and more traditional journalism. This would not be possible without the Internet and social media, she said.

“It offers a certain platform for people who otherwise would not have had a voice,” she said. “And the results are amazing, whether it’s the Arab Spring or anything minor in our community, the impact is extraordinary. That is the kind of golden age of journalism, in a way.”

She then went on to explain that this journalism “Garden of Eden” has a snake.

Huffington described that the criteria of success online is changing from quality to “virality.” She is worried that journalists are focusing too much on getting the most Facebook likes and Twitter re-tweets that they are sacrificing the excellence of their work. “I think that is something which is becoming increasingly a problem,” she said.

She also believes that this new media is forcing the population to suffer from hyperconnectivity. “I don’t know about you, but I have to work hard to unplug and recharge. It’s becoming an addiction,” she said.

At this point, she realized that the cell phone ringing in the front row was her own BlackBerry, and she asked for it to be turned off.

“There’s a real paradox here that we are finding that technology is now being used to help us disconnect from technology,” she said.

Huffington shared the story of when she fainted from lack of sleep and too much stress when she went to visit colleges with her daughter. She now champions sleep and dubbed her bedroom as a “device-free zone” so she can “unplug and recharge.” She said she values sleep so much that she created nap rooms at The Huffington Post offices and is on the executive council of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

According to Huffington, 75 percent of the United States’ health care costs are for preventable chronic diseases, many associated with stress and lack of sleep.

Huffington also spoke about monetizing new media and how advertisers have had to adapt to the participation-driven Internet. She said that banner ads aren’t as effective now as they once were, and sponsorships are the new way to advertise on the Web. At The Huffington Post, brands sponsor a section for an extended period of time, which allows them to connect and interact directly with customers. “You have to stay in the arena,” Huffington said.

Huffington also invited the entire audience to become Huffington Post bloggers and shared her email address for people interested to email her directly: arianna@huffingtonpost.com.

“By 2020 we’re going to add 3 billion people to the Internet. That is absolutely stunning if you think of it. It can be incredibly powerful, or it can be incredibly troubling, and a lot will depend on how much we teach everybody to manage the technology rather than be managed by it,” Huffington said.

Huffington was named in the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the top 100 most influential people, in 2006 and 2011. Since 2010 she has been listed as one of Forbes’ most powerful women in the world.

The post Huffington addresses ‘new media’ appeared first on The Triangle.

Were you on Twitter this week? Between the Boston Marathon bombing, the ricin mailed to the president and a Mississippi senator, and the Senate voting down new gun control legislation, Twitter has had a high-traffic week. As the head of social media for The Triangle, it is my job to be logged into TweetDeck all day to monitor what people are saying about our publication. Usually I can let TweetDeck ping in the background while I get work done for co-op, but that was not the case this week.

Twenty-four-hour news outlets were using Twitter to send updates to the public about breaking news this week, often before an article was even published with the information. This up-to-the-second information shows how far we have come as a society of communicators. On Monday I was proud of how quickly information was being shared concerning the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Of course, there was nothing new The Triangle could have added to the reporting of the event, so I shut down social media operations for the rest of the day with peace of mind.

On Wednesday, the Twitter world was a different story, and I was not proud to say that I am a member of the media. A little after 1:30 p.m., The Associated Press broke a story that an arrest was imminent in the Boston bombing case. Shortly after, CNN reported that an arrest had been made regarding the bombing, and then all hell broke loose on Twitter. Members from the media rushed to the U.S. District Court in South Boston to be there when the alleged suspect arrived. The “alleged suspect in custody” would never show up because the whole media frenzy was sparked by a false report. Twitter flatlined after that. Oh, and then a bomb threat was called in for the Boston courthouse, which was evacuated immediately. There weren’t many tweets about the bomb threat, and I’m assuming that was because no one wanted to be the one to report false information again. Shouldn’t this be the way 24-hour media outlets act all the time?

I got into a discussion with a friend after this happened about how differently 9/11 was covered when we were younger. There was no Facebook or Twitter and fewer 24-hour channels. I was 9 at the time, and the only way I knew what was going on during the day of, and the days following, was by watching Matt Lauer on “Today.” I mean, I could have read the paper, but I was 9. I remember feeling scared during 9/11, but oddly enough, I felt more scared this past week. Putting the Boston bombing into perspective by looking back at the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks makes me question why. Should I have been more scared? Granted, I was a child during 9/11, and it was my right to be blissfully ignorant. But there were also far fewer channels of communication for me to hear and read about 9/11 and far less “BREAKING NEWS! OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THIS HEADLINE IN ALL CAPITALS!”

A few months ago my younger sister, a senior in high school, tweeted about how she reads Twitter every morning like it’s The New York Times. I can’t speak for all of the younger generation, but most of the students in my hometown have some sort of social media account that isn’t monitored by their parents. When the 9/11 coverage got intense, my mother would just turn off the TV and tell me to play outside. Do parents have that option anymore?

As an adult now, I can read a tweet that starts with “BREAKING NEWS” and warily take in the information. Although I’ll admit, the 24-hour blasting of breaking news wore me down this week. I was exhausted after the media roller coaster on Wednesday. But can a child or teenager decipher what news is important? Were they able to put the Boston bombing into perspective by looking at the other events that happened this week?

On Tuesday a student in my sister’s high school wrote on a wall in the school that a bomb would be going off in their school. After talking to another member of The Triangle staff, I learned that the threat in my sister’s school wasn’t an isolated incident; there was a bomb threat in a middle school and the courthouse of that staff member’s hometown. I am worried that with a communication channel such as Twitter — where there are fake accounts, comedians spewing jokes, and many statements of hyperbole (due in part to the 140-character limit) — children won’t be able to tell what is real and what is not, especially when the race to get the story out first leads news outlets to tweet things that aren’t true.

I am not saying that children’s use of Twitter and other social media outlets should be brought to a complete stop, but I believe that as adults, we have a social responsibility to teach them how to use the platforms. I think that just as a student takes classes in English language arts and writing, they should also be taught how to use social media at a younger age. It’s become one of the top ways they receive and disseminate information. The 24-hour hour news giants aren’t going to change anytime soon. Children and teenagers need to be taught how to put the events from the 24-hour news cycle into perspective so they can be children and not have to live in 24-hour terror.

The post The social media circus appeared first on The Triangle.

Drexel senior Jakub Susul was found dead by his roommate in their off-campus apartment March 2. Susul was a business major with an accounting concentration in the LeBow College of Business.

According to a close friend of Susul who wished to remain anonymous, Susul planned to get his master’s in accounting and eventually become a certified public accountant. He was in the process of applying to master’s programs at Drexel and Temple and was scheduled to take his Graduate Management Admission Test in April.

“I met Sus freshman year in my biology class and have known him for the past five years. Sus is very simply a down-to-earth person, always handling whatever came his way. He always went out of his way to help and manages to get the job done while having a good time,” Susul’s friend wrote in an email.

He continued, “Sus enjoyed the simple things, but yet never a dull moment with him. This quarter I saw him most mornings at the library, and we always talked about the future; it was great. Sus will be missed and always in my memories. May he rest in peace.”

In a message sent out March 4 to the Drexel community, also announcing the death of Drexel sophomore Thao Nguyen, President John A. Fry said, “Like you, I find these events to be shocking and upsetting, and I grieve for this young man and woman, their friends and families, and everyone who knew them. Our University will feel their absence keenly.”

Susul enjoyed hockey, snowboarding and fishing in his free time.

“Jake always gave off good vibes, was the perfect friend, always quick with support for whatever you were doing. He was a great teammate at work, hockey, snowboarding. He was often in the library and always down to catch up. I miss him. We lost a good friend, a good person,” Ari Melman, a senior business administration major, wrote in an email.

Susul had co-op jobs at Five Below and Electronic Ink during his time at Drexel.

“Jakub’s passing is very sad and difficult, if not impossible, to understand. I did not know Jakub but have spoken with two of his instructors this term. Both have said that he was smart, quiet, polite and respectful,” Frank Linnehan, interim dean of the LeBow College of Business, wrote in an email.

Susul graduated from St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in 2008. He is survived by his father and mother, Stanislaw and Urszwla Susul; his sister Natalia Susul; his grandmother Felicja Sitek; his aunts, Jadwiga and Mieczyslaw; and his uncles, Zbigniew and Jerzy Susul. His funeral was held March 7 in the Nativity BVM Church on Belgrade Street and East Allegheny Avenue in Port Richmond.

Fry included in his email the information for Drexel’s Counseling Center, whose resources are available to any student at any time for any reason, including those students who need support after these tragic losses. Students can reach a counseling professional by calling 215-895-1415 during business hours (Monday through Thursday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or 215-416-3337 any other time.

With the official opening of Dragon Cakes Feb. 11, student bakers in the Goodwin College of Professional Studies’ culinary arts program were busy Feb. 14 filling 30 orders for special Valentine’s Day cakes.

Dragon Cakes is a student-run special-occasion cake bakery that bakes, decorates and delivers cakes out of the 6th floor of the Paul Peck Problem Solving and Research Center. So far, Dragon Cakes offers five different sizes of cakes in vanilla, chocolate, or half vanilla and half chocolate flavors with four different kinds of fillings and three types of icing.

Timothy Flohr, the food and beverage manager in the Hospitality Management, Culinary Arts and Food Science program is the manager of the Dragon Cakes staff.

“People are always going out and getting cakes from other bakeries in the community, so we thought it would be good to do it [at Drexel] and showcase the culinary arts students in our program to be able to provide a service across campus,” Flohr said.

The cakes will be sold year-round, with special cakes being offered for holidays. Customers can pay for the cakes with cash, check, credit card, Dragon Dollars or a University department card. Cakes have to be ordered at least three days before they should be delivered. Customers can choose a custom message to be written on their cakes. The online order form, designed by the information technology office in Goodwin College, can be found at goodwin.drexel.edu/dragoncakes.

Flohr said, “We’re really excited to get this program started. It’s been a lot of months in the works. For the students in our program, it’s really great for them to be able to run this almost like their own business. … They’re able to utilize their culinary talents, and they learn quite a bit about entrepreneurship as well by going through the whole process of marketing, having orders come in, inventory of supplies and product.”

The idea for Dragon Cakes came to fruition in the summer of 2012. Flohr worked several months with student baker Christine Luby to bring the Dragon Cakes idea to life.

Luby, a second-year nutrition and foods major in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, was in a food science class learning about the textures and colors of cakes when she was initially approached by Flohr to decorate cakes for the culinary arts program.

She had brought her decorating equipment into class and impressed professor Rosemary Trout. Trout kept Luby’s cake to show another class, and Flohr saw her work.

“It came out of the blue. All of [a] sudden I was just making cakes up here. It’s pretty awesome,” Luby said.

Luby graduated from Bucks County Community College after completing a three-year culinary apprenticeship program. For her apprenticeship she started out in a grocery store bakery and then got hired by a family bakery, where she ended up decorating cakes.

Luby will be working alongside Marie Whitehead and Alexandra Zeitz, students in the culinary arts program. Faculty will be available to teach the bakers new decorating techniques.

“I think Dragon Cakes will be a good stepping stone into the real world of baking and pastries. I plan to own my own family bakery one day and be the head baker and pastry chef,” Whitehead said.

Luby will be working with Dragon Cakes for her spring-summer co-op this year. She and Flohr hope to expand Dragon Cakes to offer more options, including different cake flavors and cupcakes.